In this excerpt from his book The C++ Programming Language, Special Edition, Bjarne Stroustrup gives a quick tour of key library facilities to give you an idea what can be done using C++ and its standard library.

This article is excerpted from Chapter 3 of Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language, Special Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70073-5).

This chapter is from the book

3.1 Introduction

No significant program is written in just a bare programming language. First,
a set of supporting libraries are developed. These then form the basis for
further work.

Continuing Chapter 2, this chapter gives a quick tour of key library
facilities to give you an idea what can be done using C++ and its standard
library. Useful library types, such as string, vector,
list, and map, are presented as well as the most common ways
of using them. Doing this allows me to give better examples and to set better
exercises in the following chapters. As in Chapter 2, you are strongly
encouraged not to be distracted or discouraged by an incomplete understanding of
details. The purpose of this chapter is to give you a taste of what is to come
and to convey an understanding of the simplest uses of the most useful library
facilities.

The standard library facilities described in this book are part of every
complete C++ implementation. In addition to the standard C++ library, most
implementations offer ''graphical user interface'' systems,
often referred to as GUIs or window systems, for interaction
between a user and a program. Similarly, most application development
environments provide ''foundation libraries'' that support
corporate or industrial ''standard'' development and/or
execution environments. I do not describe such systems and libraries. The intent
is to provide a self-contained description of C++ as defined by the standard and
to keep the examples portable, except where specifically noted. Naturally, a
programmer is encouraged to explore the more extensive facilities available on
most systems, but that is left to exercises.